Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• Latticework of mental models – YouTube video with Mohnish Pabrai, where he talks about how using multiple mental models can help with clear thinking and improved decision-making in life, especially in investing. He describes some of the most impactful mental models he’s encountered. Interestingly, Pabrai is, or was, an avid blackjack player and describes the strategy that got him banned from Las Vegas casinos.
• Network effects drive your life – YouTube video with James Currier, Founding Partner at VC firm NFX. Currier talks about his journey from college to VC investor. He also describes how the networks we choose have an outsized impact on our lives. He argues that choices in life should heavily weight the networks that you’ll be a part of as a result of the decision. He dives deep into how network effects in business models impact a company’s success and how networks influence the trajectory of a person’s life.
• Warren Buffett’s hurdle rate – YouTube video with Danish investor Peter Gustafson. This interview is focused on value investing and what Gustafson has learned from his years as a value investor, including his mistakes. He goes into detail to describe how Warren Buffett’s hurdle rate for investments was 10% real pre-tax return. He also describes how Buffett goes as low as 7.5% for companies with attractive growth profiles.  

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 107
• Total blog posts published: 714

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 3/22/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements, a framework that includes behind-the-scenes insights on what he focuses on when reading financial statements to find companies that have a durable moat

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred twelve was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• Stablecoins = Eurodollar 2.0 – YouTube video from Bankless where these podcasters interview Brent Johnson. I’m curious about stablecoins and want to learn more about them, and Johnson’s name popped up repeatedly. What stuck with me about this interview was the impact of the passage of the Genius Act, how stablecoins are a digital version of Eurodollars, and the global implications of this.
• Move from implicit intuition to explicit decision-making – YouTube video of an Odds on Open Podcast interview with Annie Duke. When you’re deciding in uncertainty, do an expected-value calculation. Write down your thinking about it. It’s easier to spot your own mistakes and for others to spot flaws in your thinking if you write it down. Writing down your decision logic reduces errors in your thinking and makes it easier to spot errors that creep in so you can fix them. Asking people who know you well to write down their thoughts about a decision you’re considering is a way of making decisions explicitly. Creating a pre-mortem is another example.
• Writing code is over – YouTube video from No Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups interview with Andrej Karpathy. It’s a wide-ranging, helpful interview. My big takeaway is that even the people who’ve been immersed in AI for over a decade are drinking from a firehose the last few months. Also, managing multiple agents simultaneously is a difficult but valuable skill.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 106
• Total blog posts published: 707

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 3/15/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read The Laws of Trading, a framework book about making decisions in highly competitive and uncertain environments. The title is misleading because the book is about improving decision-making and understanding how markets work.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred eleven was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Continuing what I started last week, I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• The science behind naming billion-dollar products – YouTube video from My First Million where they interview the guy big brands pay to name their products. The process of how he picks names is intriguing. There’s much more science to it than I realized.
• Should your portfolio be positioned for defense or offense? – YouTube video where Howard Marks shares his thinking about risk versus reward in today’s investing environment.
• Declining liquidity is negatively impacting stocks – YouTube video from Monetary Matters with an interview of global liquidity expert Michael Howell. Interesting to understand how a booming economy reduces liquidity in financial markets, which can lead to flat or lower markets. Very counterintuitive.
• Emerging trend: internal AI platform team – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Speak, Connor Zwick. He has an internal team dedicated to helping the entire company use AI. They go around the company and set up AI infrastructure for internal teams so they can make the most of AI, which helps them move faster. Interesting concept that makes a lot of sense.
• How Blockworks bootstrapped to $150 million – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Blockworks, Jason Yanowitz. Interesting strategy of going from events to media to a data company. Focusing on an overlooked niche helped them separate from the competition. Landing a busy CEO for an interview by creating a book about his company was a nice angle. Flattery works. I think I found a digital version of the book here.
• Building a $100 million AI company – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with Dylan Fox, founder of Assembly AI. One point stood out to me: Having clarity on how the customer hears about new products and how they buy new products is important for building successful marketing efforts. You should design processes like onboarding and demand generation by working backward from that understanding. Taking what worked at another company or space and replicating it isn’t a strategy that’s guaranteed to succeed at your company.
• $1.6 million business anyone can start – YouTube interview from Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast with Sariah Howell, founder of Memory Magnets. Howell went from broke to making $600,000 in profit in a year with a simple business idea. I loved how she turned sharing her secrets about building her business into an additional revenue stream by selling products to help others start businesses just like hers. Here, the use of social media is savvy and stood out to me.
• Zara founder getting $3.7 billion dividend – See my thoughts in my post earlier this week. Building to hold forever can lead to great wealth (he’s worth $126 billion). Building to sell will get you cash quicker but won’t create this level of generational wealth.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.

For over a year, in every Sunday’s post, I shared what I’d learned from a personal project I was working on. This past week, I changed the format of that post, making it broader and sharing where I learned things. More about my thinking on this change here.

It’s early, but one effect of this change was noticeable to me immediately. Creating the new type of post forced me to review all the pieces of content I consumed that week, evaluate which ones added value, and synthesize my big takeaways from each (I need to work on this). This stood out to me because although I often save pieces to review again later in my GTD system, I don’t consistently go back and synthesize them. Creating the post was a forcing function for the review and synthesis of the most-value-added content I learned from.

Not something I thought about before making the change, but definitely a benefit.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 105
• Total blog posts published: 700

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 3/8/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Big Money Thinks Small, a framework book about biases, blind spots, and how to think to be a smarter investor. This book is helpful for decision-making, but it’s tailored more for thinking like a probabilistic investor.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred ten was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

I’m trying something new this week. I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

·      No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• 19-year-old makes $400,000 a month – Bloomberg article about how teenagers are becoming millionaires by creating games on Roblox. This is a big market and a trend that isn’t widely known or understood.
• A Wall Streeter bought one of NYC’s biggest clubs – WSJ article about a club that was doing a shocking amount of revenue. After the owners borrowed money, they ended up losing control of the club.
• “College Freshman Sells $50M AI Company” – My previous post includes links to the TechCrunch article and the founder’s X account post about the sale.
• Howard Marks memo: AI hurtles – YouTube video of Howard Marks’s latest memo on AI. This complements his December memo on AI’s ramifications for investing.
• My First Million: The product is you – YouTube video from My First Million, which is about entrepreneurship. Ideas that stuck with me: the concept of the product you’re uniquely suited to build, being you pushed out. Also, I like the impatient-with-action, patient-with-results mindset.
• Alpha Comes from a Differentiated View – YouTube video about investing from someone who worked at hedge funds like Steve Cohen’s Point72. I liked the hit rate vs. slugging thought, being right vs. getting it right, questions to ask when tracking change, and thinking in frameworks.
• Neil Howe on the Fourth Turning – YouTube interview of Cem Karsan and Neil Howe about how differences in generations lead to big societal changes and impact public markets.
• Cem Karsan’s views on current state of stock market – YouTube interview with Cem Karsan. He shares his thoughts about the current stock market and Citrini’s infamous AI report.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.

I’ve read several books about decision-making over the last few months. One concept that stood out to me, and that was mentioned in multiple books, is the decision journal. The idea is to write down your thoughts and feelings about a big decision before you make the decision. Later, after you’ve made the decision and the outcome has played out, you can reflect and record your lessons learned. The idea is to record your thinking as it’s happening so you can more easily analyze and spot patterns later. You won’t accurately remember your thinking and feelings if you don’t write them down.

I liked this idea and have wanted to implement it for some time. I finally decided to try it out when I had a decision to make recently. The outcome hasn’t played out yet, but the exercise of writing down my thinking and feelings helped me crystallize which choice was best and why. Since making and executing my decision, I’ve reviewed my thinking and already spotted a few errors. One, my thinking in one area wasn’t as tight as I thought it was, and I could have put in more work into it. Two, how I executed my decision didn’t totally align with what I said I was going to do. Close, but not exactly what I was aiming for.

My takeaway so far is that the decision journal is helpful because without it, I likely wouldn’t have spotted those errors so early or at all. The ability to compare what I was thinking, what I did, and the result should be a great tool to help improve decision-making. I hope this becomes a habit when I make big decisions.

I make it a priority to consume content every week to learn about various topics I’m curious about. Podcasts, YouTube, newspapers (digital), blogs, etc. I’ve started keeping a note in my phone with takeaways from pieces I found particularly interesting. That’s been helpful because I can quickly refer to it as needed. I’ve shared some of what I’ve consumed with friends when they mention a topic or ask a question. Based on their feedback, that’s been helpful.

I want to share what I’m consuming more broadly to expose high-quality content that others might find useful. I’m thinking about sending out a weekly email for that purpose. If that’s successful, I’ll consider developing a more deliberate process.

I’ll think about this more this week, but that might be my next project.